


The Starbuck Tradition

by AsterHowl



Series: Eris is Lurking [1]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Subtext, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 09:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4782509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsterHowl/pseuds/AsterHowl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara plans to break Helo and Chief out of the brig on Pegasus, but she is caught before she can make her escape with the others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Starbuck Tradition

**Author's Note:**

> It has always bothered me that Kara didn't seem to give a frak that Helo was going to be executed. He was supposed to be one of her oldest and closest friends. I wrote this in response to that.

It was a good plan, and for the most part, Kara had managed to pull it off. She had to improvise a little. It certainly wasn’t the plan to get caught. There had always been that risk, but Kara had been unable to live with the alternative.

She told Lee there was nothing they could do about it. She had convinced him and herself that there was no use fighting it. Between uncontainable joy and crushing devastation, she had little emotion left to deal with everything that had happened in the passing hours.

Somewhere in the middle of it, she’d been promoted. Captain Thrace. In an unsettling environment, turbulent affairs and her senses on overdrive, the encouragement Admiral Cain offered was a rare comfort and consciously or not, Kara snatched onto it like a needy child.

She was actually doing well on this ship. She was impressive to her superior, for disobeying orders no less. That kind of behaviour could earn her time in the brig back on Galactica. On Pegasus it got you a shiny new badge to spit-shine in the morning.

The situation with Helo and Chief had gutted her. Helo was one of her oldest and dearest friends out here in the ass end of black and Chief, well, she was fairly sure she owed him her life a thousand times over for keeping her Viper in shape for all these years.

She knew, even as Cain was eyeing her like the shiny beacon of hope she had been struggling for, even as she was feeling her spirits soar and her heart swell at her promise to take back Caprica, to take back their home from the toasters, a tiny part of her screamed in despair. She had done nothing. She had said nothing. She knew Helo would have done every gods damned thing he could to save her life, whatever it took, whatever the risk.

Kara allowed herself to be charmed by the claims she had longed to hear from people like the Old Man and President Roslin. She could have launched herself at Cain, grabbed her by her ears and shake so hard screaming, “You don’t get to say those things! It’s not supposed to be you!” Kara didn’t care what battlestar you served on. That definitely got you time in the brig.

“I dunno, LT.” Chief bookended these words with winces, pacing the stall, nursing his stomach. Kara stood by the door, tracing his movements with her eyes.  
“It’s Captain now.”  
He smiled, casually, reflexively, forgetting briefly the horror of his situation and embracing the pride he felt for his fellow officer. It faded in time and he spat a laugh to the floor. He nodded.  
“Congratulations.”

Seated on the bottom bunk, Helo gave her the same grim smile. He had no words of support.  
“I can’t ask you to do this, Kara. We’re already condemned. And it’s not like you’re just risking your own life. Any way I look at it, it seems to me that you’re putting the entire civilian fleet at risk.”  
She expected him to see it that way, because it was entirely true. When she told her, Roslin wasn’t going to like it either, but for now Kara only needed Helo and Chief on board.

“Do you think things will settle down after your executions are carried out? Do you think for one second the Old Man won’t resurrect that war he started while I was gone?”  
Her voice remained level despite the urgency of her words. She felt strangely serene. It could be the badge. Cain’s favour had imbued her with an intoxicating infallibility.

The men exchanged looks of regret. Chief turned into the bunk for support. “This is frakked.”  
“What does the Old Man say? What about Roslin? I can’t see her agreeing to this,” said Helo, but he seemed amused, anticipating, perhaps, Kara’s solution.  
“I haven’t approached them with this yet,” she admitted. Chief shook his head, scoffing through tight lips.  
“I can’t be responsible for the loss of innocent lives. Cain can hold the entire fleet to ransom.”

“Tyrol’s right. The moment we make a move she only has to make the order and she can take out a whole ship. She could take out Colonial One.”  
Kara did wonder if Cain would be crazy enough. Stories of her XO, of a massacre on a civilian ship, Kara had heard them all, even if she dismissed them immediately.  
“She swore an oath to protect the Twelve Colonies.”

“Tell that to the people on Scylla.”  
Kara glared at Helo, but was surprised to find the anger she expected did not accompany the gesture. It had not so much as fizzled in her gut. She held his gaze, though, and he seemed to read the response as it formed in her mind before she said it.  
“We’ve all done things.” She was unflinching and she wanted to cry. “We’ve all done what we believed was right.”

There was no way around it. Coexistence between the Pegasus regime and the fractured society Roslin and Adama could barely keep between them was a peril for fools. They were fighting different battles. They had met and rejoiced as the same people but it had become frighteningly clear to Kara that the war had changed them.

The Pegasus crew was not people as Galactica knew people. Their isolation and desperation, the horrors they had encountered, all of it had scarred each and every one of them, ripped them apart and built them anew in unrecognizable ways. They were as an entirely different species. Nature demanded a dominant race.

It was easy enough to be granted the time to stay aboard Galactica following the Resurrection Ship assault mission brief. Kara was only surprised Adama had his own reasons to see her. She listened to his plan courteously and politely requested a private audience with him and the President.

“Absolutely not.”  
Exactly the slow, precise, if hoarse words Kara had expected from the all but useless President of the Colonies. The effort to set her jaw and glare her down made the woman tremble, and Kara could tell that it humiliated her.

She lay bundled in an armchair rather than the seat behind her desk. She was clearly weakening, the strength to keep her heart beating breaking sweat across her waxen brow. She was a sight more miserable than any Kara could remember but her stubborn dignity made her tragically beautiful.

“You think your plan is any better?” Kara smiled. It was intended as an affectionate prod and the smile that quivered on Laura’s lips could not hold under the harsh reality Kara had so tenderly illuminated. There was no need for her to tell Laura she would not be able to live with herself knowing she had ordered the killing of another person in cold blood without trial. There was no need to point out that war between Pegasus and Galactica was as inevitable as the continued struggle against the Cylons.

The cringe that settled on Laura’s gaunt features accompanied a shameful moan, bringing a mournful twist to Bill’s face. She gathered her nerves quickly, refusing to be seen for too long in hopelessness.  
“Gods, Captain. Do you really think you can pull this off?”  
Composed she might look but the fear in the dying woman’s eyes was a violent magnetic storm.

“I am confident in the success of this mission.”  
When Laura stood from the armchair Bill had to hurry to help her. Though steady on her feet, Kara observed the woman decide against the step she intended to take. Obligingly, Kara approached her instead and felt Laura’s hands reach for hers, holding them with surprising strength.

Later, Kara would think that should have been the moment. That should have been the moment she finally heard what she wanted to hear from her. She wasn’t angry that it was not. She was terrified that it would be the last time they would ever see each other. And she felt, in that moment, all the hope Laura had for Earth, for Humanity, all the hope her fading heart could bear directed entirely onto her. Kara felt the woman was giving her dying wish to her.  
“Gods protect us.”

 

* * *

 

Leave it to Gaius Baltar to introduce staggering complications. She barely had her foot back on Pegasus when he was by her side. He scurried alongside her, eyes electric, hands mimicking the peculiar habits of some nervous marsupial. He smelled no better. 

“I-I wonder if I might have a word with you, Captain Thrace.”  
“I really don’t have the time. And you should go back to Galactica.”

He sliced into her path, bringing her to an abrupt stop and she cursed loudly. He was apologetic and desperate.  
“Please. A moment of your time. Please. Please.” The mere fact that it was all he could think to say stirred in Kara a reluctant pity for him. Ordering her escort go on without her, she followed him into an abandoned corridor.

“Make it fast.”  
His eyes glittered and he wasted no further time. “I understand you mean to stage an escape for Chief and Lieutenant Agathon.”  
Kara flurried her hands, grimaced and looked about anxiously.  
“The frak did you hear that?”

She couldn’t be sure but his eyes seemed to sway and focus on the empty space beside her.  
“I don’t think it matters where I heard it.” His eyes came back to her. “What matters is that I want to be a part of it.”  
“Why? You’re not a prisoner here. There’s no reason for you to…”  
The doctor put his hands on Kara’s shoulders. If she were not so startled by the desperation quivering in his eyes, she might have pulled away in disgust.

“The Cylon prisoner. I have to get her out of here.”  
Kara narrowed her eyes. Now she was disgusted.  
“You’re kidding me.”  
He stared at her.  
Kara spat. “I am not risking my life and the lives of my friends for some frakking skin-job.”

“Do you believe your friends deserve to die?” His eyes went wider, darker, crazed. “Do you believe your friends were right to risk their lives to protect Sharon? Gina is no different. No one deserves the treatment she has endured. No act deserves that kind of punishment. She is a victim. She deserves to be rescued.”

He held her, achingly quiet following his impassioned speech and Kara hated that she couldn’t deny him. She hated the look the broken Cylon gave her as she boarded the raptor. It was neither gratitude nor resentment, joy nor sorrow and yet inexplicably a familiar emotion and something Kara coiled from.

She didn’t care what Baltar planned to do with the Cylon once he got back to Galactica. Knowing Roslin she would be put right out the nearest airlock. Seemed a frakking waste.

The siren was sounding, splashing everything in red. The civilian ships would have jumped away without warning, blinked off the Pegasus dradis one by one before Cain could fathom what was happening. When every last ship had successfully jumped away, Galactica would follow.

The soldiers thundered towards the Pegasus hanger deck. Kara grabbed Helo as he stepped onto the Raptor.  
“The Cylon lives.” She was never more surprised to hear her own voice. “That’s my wish.” She could see in his eyes that Helo knew the unspoken instructions, knew instantly where to deliver the message.

The hanger doors crashed open. There was no time. Kara pushed him in, screamed at Chief to execute the jump. Kara turned in time to see Cain and a small squad of Marines, and felt momentarily flattered that the Admiral had led the search party herself. As the Raptor lifted, Kara just grinned at Cain who in the next split second realized what was about to happen.

“Get back!”

As the Raptor executed the jump, Kara felt herself propelled as though a silent bomb had detonated. All she heard was the noise her body made upon impact, but where she landed was a mystery. There was only darkness.  
  
Gradually the world returned to the pulsing in her skull and the next thing she knew she was tugged roughly to her feet and dragged before Cain. For the fury in her eyes Kara offered nothing. But all Cain did was stare and the nerves holding Kara together began silently to snap. In all her planning, she had never prepared for this moment. It was never part of her plan to get caught.

The incredulous smile that stole Cain’s features lent a chill to her voice that Kara felt settle painfully on her skin.  
“Get this thing out of my sight.”

The brig wasn’t bad. It was well lit, smelled clean and occupied two cots. Kara made use of one of them and sat down, finally feeling the weight of her defeat. Cain couldn’t really prove she was a Cylon, but she supposed she couldn’t expect to be treated like anything less.

She bit down a sob that threatened to break in her throat and her eyes sprang instantly with tears. They didn’t fall so she didn’t wipe them, but looked instead at the way they blurred the edges of her boots. The cell door slid open with a hiss like a feral animal.

A group of unfamiliar officers stepped into the cell and Kara growled as her wrists were cuffed to the edge of the bed. There was an order to leave, but until there was only one left standing in the room, Kara did not know who issued it.

The officer chuckled and Kara’s jaw trembled to the rhythmic wheezing.  
“You’re a real piece of work.”  
It didn’t matter what he said, but Kara found herself listening more closely to his every syllable. It was all she could do. All she had.  
“You earn the Admiral’s trust. You get her to give you my job.”

Taylor, then. This was Taylor. She had seen him before, talked back to him in the classic Starbuck tradition, and yet she had not recognized him at all when he walked in.

“Do you know what happened to the last person who betrayed the Admiral’s trust like this?”  
Kara didn’t think of the Cylon. She thought of Lee. She thought desperately of Lee, smiling at her, laughing with her, his goofy wide mouthed laugh that made him look like a fairground attraction.

“Tell me the coordinates.”  
Lee holding her. Just holding her.  
“I don’t know if you’re aware, Captain, but our XO, Fisk was on board Galactica when she jumped away. Admiral Cain will stop at nothing to recover him. Do yourself a favor and tell me the coordinates now.”

The strike on the Cylon Resurrection Ship had been successful, and in the euphoria of victory was the perfect time to put her plan into action. She wondered what Fisk had been doing there in the first place.

She hadn’t realized for how long she had remained silent. Then her jaw cracked and she was on her side, curling small, pain too great to make a sound. She squeezed her eyes shut but was startled by the hand that yanked her up again.

Taylor snarled wickedly. He didn’t want her to say a word.

“Stand down.”  
Cain’s voice was a decibel above silence, and burned in the air like steam. Kara felt herself released and she sat exhausted, feeling the regular pulsing of her jaw.  
“Release her.”

His hands took their time on the cuffs, twisting them just enough to let her know he could hurt her, and any time he liked, even in the presence of his superior without her knowledge.  
“Leave us.”

Taylor left the cell and the door hissed closed once more. Kara shifted on the bed, sitting herself back against the wall, bringing up her knees and closing her eyes. Her whole body ached and her joints moved like rusted bolts. She thought of Galactica. She wondered if Helo and Chief had made it. Jumping right out of the hanger deck was genius. It was the kind of stunt that got you promoted. Kara wanted to laugh but was too afraid.

By now Lee and the Old Man would know she hadn’t made it. Getting caught had never been part of her plan. In retrospect she should have arranged for an alternate jump site, somewhere to wait in case of separation. If she had been thinking clearly she might have, but her only concern at the time was her own shame in not coming up with the plan sooner.

Cain could demand the coordinates from her all she liked, they would be useless now. Another jump and they would be lost forever. Kara hoped Adama would not wait too long for her. The last time she was separated from the fleet, marooned on that dust storm rock, he’d put the entire fleet at risk trying to find her.

She counted on Roslin having the strength to order a second jump, but since then, they’d drawn closer. She mused with some irony that it might be just as painful for Laura to give up on her as it was for Lee and the Old Man.

Laura.

Another sob burned in her throat but she swallowed it down. If Taylor made good on his threat she would find a way to kill herself. She wasn’t going to end up like that sorry ass skin-job.

Cain wasn’t speaking. She had not said a single word. Kara inclined her head and opened her eyes. She wondered how long the woman had been standing there, but she was looking straight at Kara, unmoving, unresponsive.

Kara allowed herself a fleeting moment to be proud of herself. She’d never made anyone so mad, so frozen in fury. But it vanished as quickly as she felt it and in its wake was confusion. Kara studied the woman carefully. Her shoulders were set and her hands were neatly behind her back. Her jaw was locked, features stiff.

If she moved at all the only hint of it was the glimmer to her eyes as the cell lights danced in them. In alarm, Kara realized they glimmered with the threat of tears. She felt her body freeze over and she didn’t dare breathe.

The cell was deathly silent. Kara ignored even her own heart beating, though it hammered in her chest. Cain’s movements were slow, the fabric of her uniform rustling like incriminating whispers, telling her everything the woman would rather Kara didn’t know.

The Admiral sat down on the opposite cot, elbows resting on knees, back arched forward, head hung low. Helena Cain was a force unlike anything Kara had ever come up against. She wasn’t powerful. She was power. She’d seen countless wars, countless battles and walked and breathed in death.

She had taken a stand against the Cylons and was still fighting. She had just killed hundreds of enemies thought unkillable. And here, before Kara, her steel frame was bend and her firm hands shook.

The Admiral looked up, intending to assert the strength she was supposed to possess, intending to prove herself and all Kara saw was the tears that instantly fell. Cain quickly buried her face in her hands, succeeding for mere moments to keep from sobbing.

Kara was on her feet and crossing the cell before she knew really what she was going to do. She sat down beside her, reaching cautiously. Her hand hovered just above the woman’s shoulders and Kara bit her lip.

The sensation of fabric against her palm was a shock, but the way she could feel Helena’s entire body tremble was alarming. An anguished moan pierced between Helena’s palms and she sank even lower. Kara smoothed her hand across her back, rubbing slowly from shoulder to shoulder.

She didn’t wonder why. She would never ask. Helena began to droop towards her, and Kara helped her down, cradling her head on her lap and stroking her hair.

The Old Man had waited. Kara called him a frakking fool. It was the first thing she said to anyone before he hugged her tightly. Lee threw his arms around both of them. They were less happy to see Helena emerge sombrely from the Raptor. Kara had to push Lee’s gun away.

Helena stepped up to Adama, and he regarded her with a fierceness, but also a quiet encouragement. She reached for her collar, fiddling with something there and then held out a hand. When he finally extended an open hand she pressed the shiny golden pin into his palm.

“I don’t deserve this,” she said.  
The gratitude he wanted to feel was overwhelmed by confusion and sheer relief. Kara thought of how terrible things could have been. There was something pretending to be happiness in Helena’s eyes when she said, “I believe you will lead us home…Admiral Adama.”


End file.
